crime

Stephen Suh on July 10, 2015

In this week’s episode, guest host Stephen Suh interviews Dr Lisa Cacho, who is an associate professor of Latina/Latino studies and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois. Together, they discuss Dr Cacho’s recent book Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. In it, Dr Cacho explains the sociological concept of “social death” and how it often applies to racial minorities in America. Her book explores how the notion of a racial Other contributes to the criminalization of people on the basis of status, rather than their behavior.

Guest host Sarah Shannon interviews Victor Rios, professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In his recent ethnography, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, Dr. Rios searches for ways that police and a culture of punishment cause boys of color to internalize fatalistic attitudes about class and race. His book is the winner of several awards, including the American Sociological Association’s Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award.

In this episode, we talk with Emily Baxter, creator of the documentary project “We Are All Criminals,” where participants recall crimes they committed for which they were never caught. Emily is also the Director of Public Policy and Advocacy at the Council on Crime and Justice. In her work, she is responsible for development and implementation of the organizations’ public policy agenda, services for individuals with criminal records, and education of employers to promote the hiring of individuals with criminal records. She is also the Fall 2013 Robina Institute Visiting Fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School.

This week we talk with Shadd Maruna and Fergus McNeill about their documentary project, The Road From Crime. This documentary was produced as part of the larger Discovering Desistance Project, which aims to share knowledge and improve understanding of why people desist from crime. First, we hear a clip from the opening sequence of the film, then we talk with Shadd and Fergus themselves as they describe the process of producing this project.

In this episode, we talk with University of Pittsburgh School of Law Professor David Harris about his new book Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science. We discuss the cultural and organizational resistance to adopting scientific techniques into police and prosecutorial practices, and what social scientists can do about it.

If you like Office Hours, you probably already love Contexts magazine and now you’ve got another great podcast to subscribe to with the Contexts Podcast. So head over to contexts.org to subscribe and while you’re there, check out the new Spring 2012 issue of Contexts!

Our Teaching TSP team has also written up a series of classroom questions and exercises to be used alongside this interview. You can check them out here.

This episode we talk with Robert Sampson about his new book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. In the face of globalization and the widespread belief that the “world is flat,” Sampson shows how the world is actually very uneven, and that local communities make a great difference in how people live their lives across a wide range of phenomenon, from homicide and child health, to leadership networks, teenage pregnancy, altruism, and home foreclosures.

This episode is the first Drop In: a new, shorter style of Office Hours episodes that we’ll be mixing into the podcast every so often alongside our longer episodes. Our first Drop In guest, Matt Snodgrass, discusses his recent Criminology article, Does the Time Cause the Crime?